Frank took the envelope with an inexplicable feeling of hope.  That his mother had forgotten important papers did not surprise him in the least.  She had once taken a mortgage held by his father and pasted it over a place in a chimney where it smoked.  She said herself that her temperament was not one for affairs.

A quick exchange of glances passed between Frank and Katrine as he excused himself to go to his room for rest, and then, alone at twilight, he broke the seal upon the confession of that Francis who had preceded him.  To his utter confounding, he discovered in the envelope a certificate of legal marriage between Francis Ravenel and Patricia McDermott, duly witnessed and sealed.  Wrapped with several letters which had been exchanged between them was a detailed account of the unfortunate affair in his father’s crooked writing, and inside of all a bill of divorce, which had been obtained in Illinois previous to the elder Ravenel’s marriage with the beautiful Julie D’Hauteville, of New Orleans.

As Frank read the history of the boyish folly he felt that little excusing was needed for his dead father, for the early marriage seemed but an escapade of a spoiled and self-indulgent boy with a headstrong and sentimental girl, neither of whom had taken a thought for the future.

“My wife renounced her faith to marry me [his father wrote].  The first year of our marriage, which was a legal one only, was one of great unhappiness, for at heart Patricia remained a Catholic still.  She was depressed, suspicious, afraid of the future.  Recriminations and quarrels were constant between us.  Finally, I went to America with no farewell to my wife, to acquaint my father with my foolish act, and to ask him to make some suitable provision for us.  Immediately following my departure, I discovered, my wife re-entered the Catholic Church.  Soon afterward I heard that her father had extended his forgiveness, and that she had been welcomed back by her kinfolk in Ireland.  Hearing nothing from her whatever, with the procrastination which was ever one of my great faults, I put off doing anything about the annulment of the marriage until the father of Quantrelle le Rouge wrote me that he had heard of her death as well as that of the child.  But before my marriage to Mademoiselle D’Hauteville, I took the precaution to obtain a divorce quietly in Illinois.  Even if Patricia were living and should marry again, I knew she needed no protection to make the marriage a valid one, as her Church had never recognized that she was married to me, the ceremony having been performed by a Protestant.”

Frank laid aside the papers, and, with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, sat in the gathering darkness thinking, with neither continuity nor result, of that strange life—­current which, the family history claimed, connected him backward to the song-making minstrels of the time of Charlemagne; to the gallant lovers in the time of the Stuarts; to the self-indulgent and magnetic Ravenels of North Carolina.